A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

[IlliniDave]

I don't think we disagree then. This, here, is the crux of the problem and I don't know the answer. Is it enough to "light the fuse" under the glycolytic system in order to trigger increased capability of the oxidative system (which would result in a higher VO2max)? This would be REHIT. Or do you need to burn down the glycolitic system to achieve the effect. This would be HIIT. And third question for extra credit? Is there a difference between the two triggers or methods?

...

In summary, if fancy gadgets can cause exercise to happen when it otherwise wouldn't happen, I'm all for it. Preventative health is pretty good ROI compared to fixing even the smallest issues after things have gone bad.

I'm not 100% sure what you are asking. I don't have a reference at hand, but there have been peer-reviewed randomized trials that pit a REHIIT regimen of 15 minutes total per week against moderate intensity cardio for 150 min/week (I believe the REHIT was done using the bike I alluded to above, and possibly the Zone 2 group used it as well) and the results for the REHIIT group were a 12% improvement in VO2max versus 7% for the Zone 2 control in 5 weeks iirc, and a 62% reduction in metabolic disease markers versus 27% reduction in the control group (dunno how that was gauged or what in particular they looked at). I presume (but don't know) VO2 max was measured using some sort of laboratory CPET device. These figures were quoted by the inventor of the tested device. It's possible he's dishonest, but they also have a very generous return policy (100 days, any reason), so I lean on the side of him being honest.

The "mechanism" that's supposed to trigger the adaptation is rapid depletion of a chunk of muscle glycogen stores, something like a third-ish of it (not sure if that's per sprint or total in a 2-sprint workout). Eating into that reserve so rapidly apparently tells the body it needs to get fitter, and assuming veracity of the research/reporting, results do indicate that rapid partial depletion of glycogen will lite the fuse of a process that among other things results in higher VO2 max. The guy who invented the bike isn't the discoverer of REHIIT, he invented the bike because he could not replicate the laboratory results of earlier REHIIT research on a normal stationary bike.

I don't know if complete exhaustion of glycogen stores a la traditional HIIT triggers any additional mechanisms. And I don't know how much comparison has been done between REHIIT and other HIIT protocols. Generic HIIT certainly will trigger the gylcogen depletion mechanism, but supposedly with higher levels of blunting stress. I'd love to know what led whoever pioneered the REHIIT protocol to question whether interval training might be more effective if less total work was done.

Consistency doing something is the biggest hurdle for most people, and I'm prone to getting bored with exertion as an investment for an uncertain future. I'm all for anything that makes it a little nerdy and hence interesting to me.

***

I'm just taking a break from working on the desk I rescued from the side of the road last September. It's not in as bad a shape as I remember it being, and it seems like leaving it in the cold dry air over the winter took care of much of the funky smell. I wondering now if the smell was just absorbed from other sources it shared space with. But I'm giving it a good disinfecting with the stuff Ego mentioned a while back for mold remediation. I'm probably only going to sand and refinish the top surface. The rest isn't bad except for a few character-giving dings and small scratches. I'll tell people I antiqued it, lol. Or as we often say up here, it's a cabin, what do you expect?! Anyway, picking that thing up and ultimately putting it to good use might be among the most ere things I've ever done. Maybe there's hope for me yet. But it's 49 deg and breezy so not a bad day to get out for a hike. The desk will still be there to work on another day.

[7Wannabe5]

I think you could say that heart health is a pretty good proxy for biological age and skip the middle man. If nothing else CVD is the top cause of death here in the US.

I guess I don't think "biological age" and "mortality risk" are one and the same. I think I would associate "biological age" most with the body's own ability to repair itself. So, maybe something more like how wrinkled one's ass skin (because less likely to be exposed to the sun) has become would be a good proxy after age 60.

[IlliniDave]

I guess I don't think "biological age" and "mortality risk" are one and the same. I think I would associate "biological age" most with the body's own ability to repair itself. So, maybe something more like how wrinkled one's ass skin (because less likely to be exposed to the sun) has become would be a good proxy after age 60.

Okay, fair enough. Not only does chronological aging affect what you see when you judge the appearance of your backside in a mirror, but also how well your body can repair your heart, lungs, vasculature, brain, etc., plus how well they serve the rest of the body, and when that ability fades, your mortality risk increases. So for my purposes I view "biological age" as fairly coupled with all-cause mortality risk. At least the way Function Health computes it for me, it's largely a gauge or relative metabolic decline. They compute it for me and I look at it and it's fun that at least my guts function as well as those of a typical person somewhat younger than me, but it's largely the metabolic health I am after, which I tend to think of as systemic health.

But if your goal is primarily to appear youthful, then you may be more interested in the relative visual wear and tear on your exterior than how well your inner workings are functioning. They are probably correlated most of the time anyway.

[IlliniDave]

Offline I've been spitballing ideas for what in my engineer noggin I think of as performance competencies I'd like to maintain in the 75 and up age range. The first one I'd come up with and mentioned above is "Don't get trapped in Old Story Land". I'd kicked around a few others but none of them added much to that, so I'm going to use it as a guiding mantra. I've started a list of things like being fit enough to walk at least 2 miles on a reasonable overland trail, shovel 6" of snow off a 2000 sq ft area (both of which are sporty for an 80 yr old), etc. Then I decided making out a detailed list wasn't really going to buy me much. You could say I'm already preparing for most of them (except I'm not paying as much attention to flexibility as I probably should). I could sense I was overthinking something that it's best for me to keep simple. I don't think anyone has been waiting with bated breath for a continuation of that theme and I'm going to scratch it from the agenda for now. I'm just going to do my best to stay healthy and pursue contentedness.

It appears I'll have a lot of opportunity for functional strength training this summer. In the enclave up here we've got a decent amount of jointly owned property. There has been an outbreak of spruce bud worm the last few years (happens every 40 years or so historically) and the net result is a lot of dead balsam firs. They tend to grow in thick clumps and are a pretty serious fire hazard. One of the neighbors has taken it upon himself to start removing them and I volunteered to help. It's his chainsaw so my job will mostly be hauling cut up sections and loading them into his truck, or a trailer if we can find one, then with a full load take them to one of the burn piles the county maintains and offload them. Then maybe next season we'll get some nicer trees, probably red and while pines, planted to help stabilize some embankments along our road.

I'm pretty pleased with the guided meditations and brainhackery "entrainment" I've been doing. I don't have any hard data to point to, just a subjective feeling of ease. I'm still picking up new stuff on my guitar more readily than I had been prior to some time last year. It may seem like a trivial thing. I'd put a decent amount of effort into it for a lot of years and felt like I was a moth bouncing off a street lamp. When I stop and think about it I'm still astonished at what's happened over the last year. Happy mitochondria = Happy Life.

[ertyu]

I'm pretty pleased with the guided meditations and brainhackery "entrainment" I've been doing.

Which ones are you doing? Apps or?

[7Wannabe5]

But if your goal is primarily to appear youthful, then you may be more interested in the relative visual wear and tear on your exterior than how well your inner workings are functioning. They are probably correlated most of the time anyway.

I was considering the correlation. Also the fact that the older you get, the more genetic factors influencing extreme longevity come into play. For example, there is quite strong correlation between mother reaching age 85 and daughters surviving past 90, likely due to mitochondrial DNA. Our obsolescence is planned, but there is a small degree of inherited variability.

Also, when I look at other aging humans, there does seem to be an "old" vs. "fit" split. For example, Biden looked like somebody with better diet/fitness practices when he was 78, but Trump looks younger in the sense of less desiccated. Of course, somebody could also look "young and fit for age" or "old and unfit for age." And, some of this is likely due to over-emphasis on BMI as indication of fitness.

[IlliniDave]

Which ones are you doing? Apps or?

Most of the ones I do are simple guided meditations that are built into the Oura ring app. The fancier ones that use beats and tones (there are technical terms for them I don't recall offhand) are from a subscription service called BrainTap. Sometimes the tones and beats are standalone, or embedded in music, or form a backdrop for an ordinary guided meditation. I started with a free trial of that then continued it for a couple of months but I'll probably cancel it. I think 90% of the benefit comes from just showing up, as they say.

[IlliniDave]

I was considering the correlation. Also the fact that the older you get, the more genetic factors influencing extreme longevity come into play. For example, there is quite strong correlation between mother reaching age 85 and daughters surviving past 90, likely due to mitochondrial DNA. Our obsolescence is planned, but there is a small degree of inherited variability.

Also, when I look at other aging humans, there does seem to be an "old" vs. "fit" split. For example, Biden looked like somebody with better diet/fitness practices when he was 78, but Trump looks younger in the sense of less desiccated. Of course, somebody could also look "young and fit for age" or "old and unfit for age." And, some of this is likely due to over-emphasis on BMI as indication of fitness.

There's probably a genetic component, and maybe more critically an epigenetic component. The latter is theoretically something a person can effect through various measures since it's often environment and lifestyle that drive unfavorable epigenetic change through life.

The "biological age" calculation I get doesn't even consider BMI. If my BMI was high due to "bad" visceral and organ fat, that would show in the inflammation and other markers. But not all fat is bad, and at my height if I was built like a typical NFL defensive back, I'd have an "overweight" BMI. It's just too crude.

There are a number of ways biological age is estimated. For one that's internal data-driven, the one I get is probably one of the simpler, arguably less accurate ones compared to things like measuring actual telomere length. Some months back I included all the biomarkers Function uses in the thread. I want to think there's about 9 of them. IIRC, not one of the nine are things I get in my standard Medicine 2.0 annual blood tests. They didn't invent the algorithm, they used one developed somewhere in academia IIRC.

[IlliniDave]

My mattress topper arrived yesterday, but too late in the evening to use it last night, I opted for an soft foam one and it'll take a day or so to expand to full size, especially given how chilly it is around here.

Predictably my sleep scores have fallen quite a bit. I'm using the score as a metric because I haven't set aside any time to dig deeper yet. Recent weekly averages have meandered between upper 70s low 80s over the last several weeks and this past week I'm at 71. Last year I saw a similar drop but only to 74. My estimated active calorie burn this week is more than 2x what it was the first week last year and around 60% higher than the last few weeks heading up here. Not much of it has been workout stuff, just work and one long 7-hr day of fishing. I spent a few hours yesterday policing up one small corner of my lot--per the USFS as part of fire resilience they recommend clearing all limbs off trees up until 8-10ft from the ground. The little corner was mostly a thicket of balsam fir there was a lot to clear. Not heavy work, but a lot of it. The falloff in sleep is not due to sedentary lifestyle. Hopefully the topper will help. Spring of 24 I switched to my old but spendy memory foam mattress from a conventional one I'd been using and saw an immediate uptick in sleep.

I used a long week of chores around the cabin as a partial justification to take a week off the heavy bands, but I'll jump back on those early Monday. I listened to a podcast with Gabrielle Lyons yesterday while sanding the old desk I'm working on and she convincingly refuted one of the principles I'd geared my workout strategy on. I'd been operating on the idea that muscle strength might be more important than mass per se for graceful aging. Lyons who apparently has roots in gerontology/geriatrics argues muscle mass is more important. Not only does muscle mass correlate positively with strength in general, and strength does help with things like avoiding falls and getting up from one, but muscle also serves an endocrine function, as a metabolic buffer for glucose, and as a reserve of calories and maybe more importantly, of amino acids. Survivability of nearly any serious disease--cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.--goes up markedly as muscle mass increases. I'm thinking now my pendulum will swing a little less in the direction of VO2 max as I want to do at least a little better than treading water with lean mass gains. That of course makes REHIIT an even more attractive option than it already was.

I did have 2 bad nutrition days earlier in the week, but I'm back on the straight and narrow with that. Neither immediately resulted in poorer sleep than the rest of the week, but I do wonder if assaults to my still recovering metabolic health don't undermine sleep in some way.

[Scott 2]

I'd been operating on the idea that muscle strength might be more important than mass per se for graceful aging. Lyons who apparently has roots in gerontology/geriatrics argues muscle mass is more important.

I always found strength a more appealing goal. Function over form. But with maximum effort off the table post surgery, I've been lifting like a bodybuilder over the last few months. Chasing a pump and soreness. Emphasizing the eccentric. Seeking tension when the muscle is long. It's a lot easier on the joints. Some muscles, like my chest and quads, are getting far better stimulus. It's clear the training offers a more sustainable path.

[IlliniDave]

Using resistance bands certainly helps with aligning the loading with the stronger parts of the range of motion. But the protocol of one set to failure is not optimal for muscle hypertrophy. Soreness is an overall inefficiency since resources are diverted it for repair of damaged fibers, but I get the sense it's unavoidable if one wants to really maximize hypertrophy since volume is so important in that endeavor. I'll have to give some thought to how I approach strength training going forward. I mean, I don't know if Lyons would look at me and say I'm lacking or not--and I don't really know if there's a point of diminishing return. For a dude in his 60s I don't think I'm noticeably sub par or anything, though certainly not a ripped beast. I'm pretty certain I have added muscle mass in the last 51 weeks. Maybe I can keep going like I have been and continue to get size gains as well as strength gains, or maybe I need to get into more of a bodybuilding protocol. I'd been planning to drop my protein intake to 0.7-0.8 x body weight in grams from 0.8-1.0x, but maybe that is something to rethink.

Spot on about sustainability being paramount. A rigorous program you wind up dropping after a few weeks or less because either you're bored or too beat up does you no good in the long haul. Obviously there is some expected short-term discomfort, but when it starts to get systemic and chronic it's too much in my view. I think a good fitness regimen needs balance and day-in day-out as the months stack up should leave you feeling much better on the whole.

On the strength front I've noticed a few areas since I've been here at the hideout that I at least feel stronger than I did at the end of last season--wrangling the kayak around on land and down to the water, and moving the desk I've mentioned around in the garage stood out. And I'm sensing a good deal of increased mental energy compared to what I remember early season last year--enough that Oura is starting to give me warnings about not dedicating enough time to rest and recovery. So I'm going to deliberately take it a little easy today. Just a hilly walk, and I've been helping my neighbor make some mods to his boat and he wanted to take it out and do a little fishing on our local lake this afternoon. And at some point I'll launch the kayak this afternoon/evening too, and check everything out on it. We should get up near 70 today which should get me over the T_air+T_water > 120F condition. So maybe not all that restful of a day after all, lol.

[Scott 2]

Too excited having fun to sleep. Kinda sounds like winning. No doubt using resistance bands at high intensity would add some muscle. Though the strength curve probably makes loads low when the muscle is stretched.


What's been interesting about chasing soreness, is the muscles I couldn't get sore. That lead me to obvious holes in the basic strength advice - squat, hinge, push, pull, carry. My implementation, anyway.

Take my squat as an example. It's posterior chain dominant. Chill, that's where 80% of our muscle is or whatever. Only it means my knees never get very far over my feet, that knee angle doesn't close fully, and my quads get very little work. I also fail to strengthen my knee in that missing ROM.

With every movement, I developed a "strong" pattern that leaves weak parts untrained. Bench - tuck the arms a little, take the elbows lower, slightly narrower grip, big arch, etc. And now it's almost all shoulders and triceps. Oops.

Pulls, I always retract my shoulders hard. Leaving out significant parts of my lats. And I feel like my posture can look overly retracted in pictures.

It doesn't help that overhead presses for my shoulders, never really hit the side delts. The shoulder is always locked in one place. No wonder it's touchy.

So beyond simulating more muscle, I think the change is uncovering and working on imbalances. This sort of thing takes a year to fully play out, but I'm enthusiastic.

[IlliniDave]

Too excited having fun to sleep. Kinda sounds like winning. No doubt using resistance bands at high intensity would add some muscle. Though the strength curve probably makes loads low when the muscle is stretched...

Yep, in general the load is smaller using bands when a muscle is stretched and that's generally considered a positive about bands. At the stretched (weaker) end of a ROM a higher percentage of force is borne by the joint itself rather than the muscle. So the advantage is that it lowers the risk of joint injury, not so much that it is superior for muscle hypertrophy compared to static weights. I've seen arguments that assert that it does have strength-building advantages compared to straight weightlifting in some respects, in that you can work out with more force in the stronger portion of a ROM since you aren't limited by what you can handle in the weakest part of the movement, but there are ways to compensate for that while using weights so it's not an absolute advantage. It's the combination of joint protection and overall simplicity that appeals to me, even though the loads are very light when the band is minimally stretched. The workaround in the protocol I try to follow is once you start failing at the full range of motion you continue with partial reps until at the end of a set you can barely move the bar even an inch or two (for most things I do, I have my bands attached to a bar). That probably not as effective in the long run as moving a static load for hypertrophy, and why I don't think bands have made big inroads in bodybuilding. My understanding is that in the heavier versions, bands came out of power lifting, often used in combination with static loads, but I'm not up on all the details of that. I haven't thought about it too much, but I'm sure my routine leaves a lot of individual muscles not getting fully taxed.

I didn't get a sense that in the discussion about muscle mass and resilience of health that balancing the development of musculature everywhere was a large consideration, though from a functional perspective it seems like balance would be a very desirable thing.

I'm not sure how much I can chalk up my sleep characteristics to being excited and anxious for tomorrow to arrive. I did get a good quality mattress topper that I've used for three nights now. It does seem to help with the pressure point issue but so far my sleep quality as Oura scores it hasn't improved. I don't feel sleep deprived or anything, and my total sleep time hasn't fallen off much (yet) but both my deep and REM are in a lull. I'm going to start paying more attention to be evening routine. Back home I'm much more prone to arranging my day around my evening wind down schedule where here I'm I'm a little more free form with my time. Another variable is that using Oura as a measure, I'm quite a bit more active here than back home. So far 2-3X more, although it doesn't really feel like it. You'd think that would improve sleep though. I make note of the information I have as a curio, but at the end of the day it is what it is, and I don't want to put a damper on my time here stressing over it.

[Scott 2]

I would've expected the increased activity to raise your deep sleep, at the very least. Curious as to the answer, if you can sort it. My low deep sleep nights feel so different in the morning, that it'd make me question the oura.


The partials are a good way to get more from the bands.

I used bands with my strength training for awhile. The intent was to teach 100% effort through a full rep. Increase power generation, by using more muscle fibers at once. That is something I struggle with. I think they helped. Though I stopped because band work is freaking hard. Not well aligned with my nature.

I believe geared powerlifting specifically popularized them. Which, they have a very sport specific case for. The lifters are wearing a squat suit or bench shirt, along with knee or elbow wraps. In other words - elastic springs that take tension off when the muscle is stretched. So bands simulate the strength curve of their sport. Very smart.


My periods of muscle or strength loss are always preceded by injury or illness. While it's framed as the slow decline of aging, my bet is acute events are more typical. With age it gets harder to build back up. At a certain point, the events hit faster than one can recover. So if I can avoid some of them, I think it'll be an easy win.

[IlliniDave]

...

My periods of muscle or strength loss are always preceded by injury or illness. While it's framed as the slow decline of aging, my bet is acute events are more typical. With age it gets harder to build back up. At a certain point, the events hit faster than one can recover. So if I can avoid some of them, I think it'll be an easy win.

Yes and no. Sarcopenia is a real thing that happens to older people and makes them far less physically robust and susceptible to chronic disease, but I believe you're spot on in that for someone who has marked sarcopenia already, when an event happens they're unable to recover to their pre-event (with marked sarcopenia) condition and their decline accelerates. I think the idea is to build up a reserve of muscle while your body is still able to produce the hormones needed to grow it, which might well allow a person to weather more hits and still recover to a level that leaves them a reasonable quality of life.

[IlliniDave]

I was looking over some activity data Oura logs and found a way to breakdowns of activities by cardio zones. It allows me to log data for an activity that's not one of the "supported" workout activities (indoor/outdoor walking, biking, and running only) and have a long list of tags I can assign. So I started using it during various activities like "housework" and "yard work".

From it, in Oura's view, I logged 76 minutes of Zone 2 Monday and Tuesday. Most of that came in chunks either paddling around in the kayak or wielding my string trimmer. I haven't done much dedicated walking, but I did take a hilly 1/2-mile each way walk down the road to visit an acquaintance (who wasn't around) and never got out of Zone 1.

I don't know if "incidental" Zone 2 has any efficacy. I'm guessing it has at least some marginal benefit when it comes in chunks of 20 minutes or more.

I also logged about 2.5 hr in Zone 1 during those days and probably achieved more than that doing other things during which I didn't bother to turn on the data tracking, and it doesn't require much exertion besides moving around to inch up my heart rate to Zone 1(82-98 bpm per Oura's age-based estimate). Zone 1 doesn't do much for cardiovascular health, at least directly, but it does bestow some metabolic benefits when it comes in the form of repeated low intensity firing of muscles (like in easy walking).

I don't know how long I'll keep up my current activity level here. I mentioned it's been generally higher than even past initial first few weeks up here. I attribute it mostly to mindset. I'm less focused on relaxing than normal. And most of the activity has come in the form of chores and projects, rather than pursuing outdoorsman-ish recreation stuff.

I suppose I mention it because I'm hopeful I can keep it up and get maybe 3 or so hours of Zone 2 without having to carve 3 hours out of the week to do specific Zone 2 workouts.

[IlliniDave]

I would've expected the increased activity to raise your deep sleep, at the very least. Curious as to the answer, if you can sort it. My low deep sleep nights feel so different in the morning, that it'd make me question the oura...

My own personal observation is that getting much under 6 hours of total sleep in a night is when I definitely feel a step behind the next day. That happened last night. 5h 45m. I haven't detected any dependence on either REM or deep. They tend to go down as total sleep goes down, but it's easy common to have nights with the same levels of those where total sleep is up above 6h and I feel fine/normal.

There's plenty to question about Oura or any other sleep tracker when it comes to absolute accuracy. I'm beginning to think it's possible Oura somewhat under counts REM for me. Not grossly though. But as far as deep sleep goes, there's nothing about sleeping in a different zip code that should cause it to measure or make computations differently, so I'm thinking trends are qualitatively believable.

[Scott 2]

I guess it's unlikely the new environment would impact how the ring measures. I just see a lot of correlation between sleep stage durations and how I feel.

I can have full nights very low in specific sleep stages. It's usually from doing something I know better than. Like yesterday I had 200mg of caffeine in the morning. I tried to use melatonin to force the sleep. My duration was close to 7h, but I only got two rem cycles, half my preferred duration.

I am mentally slow today, though my body was 100% in the gym. Conversely, when only deep is shorted, I'm physically behind. Everything's heavy, but my brain is game.

Maybe it's all placebo. The sleep hygiene benefits are real in any case. I'm working off findings observed in my own body now, instead of following someone else's rules. That's pretty cool.


It's great the oura can give you zone 2 feedback. I'm always a little miffed by the volume of useless work I output at they gym. Getting some of that through life is very appealing, in theory. The reality is I'm lazy and favor a climate controlled environment where I can mentally wander off. I have two bikes and can be on a fantastic 10 mile trail in minutes. Yet I often ride the gym's exercise bike. So lazy.

I can't get walking into zone 2 either.

[IlliniDave]

I guess it's unlikely the new environment would impact how the ring measures. I just see a lot of correlation between sleep stage durations and how I feel...

I can't get walking into zone 2 either.

It may be that you're a little more attuned to your overall state of being than I am, or maybe we just function a little differently. I've wondered if there isn't a fairly high amount of variation in sleep from person to person, and whether it's a bit of folly to try to adhere to generic recommendations. I had a fairly good night of sleep last night by my hideout standards. 6.5 hr with a hair over an hour of both deep and REM. I'll try to pay more attention to any sensitivity I have to stages. It might be there and my filter is just a bit coarse.

I've found pretty significant benefit from being mindful of sleep hygiene, maybe more from anything other than avoiding largish meals within 2-3 hours of lights out time. I did that for other reasons and actually as I think about it, it could probably be considered sleep hygiene as well. Further, as I think about it I haven't been as diligent about that as I could be lately. That's something I can work on. And "+1" to using feedback from yourself to dial in all aspects of lifestyle. Just paying attention to how you respond to certain "inputs" is a step a lot of people don't take. I think there's significant benefit even if the feedback is somewhat subjective.

I got another 42 minutes of Zone 2 yesterday. Part was while giving my rescue desk a good cleaning, which was a surprise except that in thinking back on it I was in and out of a lot of held-at-the-bottom squats and had a lot of arm motion going on. The rest came from swinging my string trimmer and helping my neighbor load up pieces of a dead tree he took down, and loading some dead wood from my place, and dumping it at the burn pile. When it comes simply from doing normal things I want to do during a day it accumulates unnoticed and I don't get into the "this is tedious" mindset. I do question whether incidental Zone 2 has any efficacy of the type the studied Zone 2 workout types do.

I can get into Zone 2 heart rate territory walking but I really have to work at it. Next chance I have to get a roadside walk in I might try some "interval walking" which as I understand it is alternating 5 minute intervals of walking normal and "power walking". Or I might try power walking on all the uphill stretches and normal walking on the downhill sections. Today is a fishing day in the wilderness area so that's apt to be a Friday project. I have a lot of resistance to converting my walking time to a deliberate Zone 2 endeavor. One of the reasons is that my normal walking is a very soothing part of my routine. Another is that staying in Zone 0/1 involving all the large muscle groups firing rhythmically/repeatedly means they have an endocrine function that's supposed to come with metabolic benefits. Subjectively I just feel better overall if I'm getting 3-5 hours or more of strolling weekly.

Yeah, I'm guilty of a good amount of laziness myself when it comes to certain activities. I mean, I can put together a reasonable argument why something like REHIIT is a good protocol for me to pursue since I have a desire to improve several performance modalities simultaneously as well as having reasons to believe keeping physiological stress minimal (in the hormonal/inflammation sense) is in my best interest, but my lazy bone stands up and roars approval when I see a claim that I can achieve the same net benefit of 5 hours/wk of slogging in 30 minutes/wk of work, albeit it rather hard work.

[Ego]

I mean, I can put together a reasonable argument why something like REHIIT is a good protocol for me to pursue since I have a desire to improve several performance modalities simultaneously as well as having reasons to believe keeping physiological stress minimal (in the hormonal/inflammation sense) is in my best interest, but my lazy bone stands up and roars approval when I see a claim that I can achieve the same net benefit of 5 hours/wk of slogging in 30 minutes/wk of work, albeit it rather hard work.

While what I have been doing in the spin classes is not strictly REHIIT, I can say for sure that after the third class on Tuesday I was absolutely gutted to the point where I decided to skip it today and allow my body to acclimate to the new modality. Over the past year of travel I have not done any short burst, all-out sprints, so it will take time for me to adjust. The classes are at 6am. After the classes, throughout the day I felt a mental and physical twitchiness that I have not felt since my days of doing running track workouts, and at night my legs were twitching as if I were still pedaling. I think this is due to some neuromuscular stress from the short bursts of effort that is not present in the lower intensity work. ... but then again, what do I know? So, while I cannot say exactly what it is doing, I can say it is doing something different that anything else I do.